As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Friday, 26 July 2013

‘Tideline’ by Penny Hancock

The unreliable narrator is a useful device in suspense fiction, and the
main narrator of this taut, atmospheric novel is more unreliable than most.

It’s
a story about troubled women. Sonia is in her early forties, and has a
turbulent past and a present which doesn’t help matters. Helen finds it hard to
take responsibility, and blocks out reality with alcohol. The lion’s share of
the narration falls to Sonia, and Helen fills out the details Sonia can’t be
aware of.

The
story revolves around Sonia’s kidnapping and imprisonment of a beautiful
teenage boy, Jem, who reminds her powerfully of a boy from her own teenage
years whose identity remains unrevealed until almost the end. She doesn’t see
it as kidnapping, of course; even when her family arrives home and she has to
hide him in the garage in hypothermic temperatures, she only wants what she
sees as the best for him, and is prepared to go to any lengths to give it to him.

Hancock
sets the disquieting narrative against a richly evocative background of the Thames embankment – the river and Sonia’s house on the
edge of are almost characters in their own right – and winds up the tension
level by degrees until it, and Sonia, finally snaps. It carries potent echoes
of the John Fowles classic The Collector, though Sonia is a more
sympathetic character than Fowles’s chilling butterfly fanatic. Her damaging
relationships with her glacial mother, bullying husband and distant daughter
may strike chords with some readers, and certainly provide a credible context
for her troubled mind.

Helen
is at the centre of the police search for Jem, and has her own troubles to
contend with. She is only one of a varied cast of characters to whom Hancock
applies a deft hand. Tideline isn’t a comfortable read, but then the
best suspense novels never are. It may mess with your head; Jem is the only
innocent party, but I found myself feeling reluctant sympathy for both Sonia
and Helen and none at all for their abrasive families.

It’s
Penny Hancock’s debut. If she continues in this vein, she may well become a
contender for Sophie Hannah’s crown.

-----

Reviewer: Lynne
Patrick

Penny Hancock. Afterr
several years in London, Penny Hancock now lives
in Cambridge
with her husband and three children. She is a part-time primary school teacher
at a speech and language school and has travelled extensively as a language
teacher. Tideline is her first novel.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen,
and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but
never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher
for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now
burgeoning.

She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house
groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.